Edel Assanti is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and monotypes by the pioneering American artist, writer and curator Harmony Hammond, her first with the gallery. Drawing on Hammond’s longstanding investigation of the bodily and corporeal potentialities of abstraction, these works engage with Minimalism and imbue it with political narrative, reflecting a practice shaped by time and tenacity.
Hammond was a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s. She co-founded A.I.R. – which, in 1972, became the first women’s co-operative art gallery in New York during the second wave feminist period – and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). Throughout her five-decade long career, she has worked at the very limits of the surface of painting, using additive and accumulative techniques – collaging, wrapping, patching and braiding – to disrupt and penetrate what she calls the ‘skin of paint.’
Hammond’s Grommetypes – a term coined by Lucy Lippard – refuse printmaking’s emphasis on replication, favouring disruption and peripheral control.